About the Book

The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools illuminates the relationship between the Dakota Sioux community and the schools and surrounding region, as well as the community’s long-term effort to maintain its role as caretaker of the “sacred citadel” of its people.

Cynthia Leanne Landrum explores how Dakota Sioux students at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota and at Pipestone Indian School in Minnesota generally accepted the idea that they should attend these particular boarding institutions because they saw them as a means to an end and ultimately as community schools. This construct operated within the same philosophical framework in which some Eastern Woodland nations approached a non-Indian education that was simultaneously tied to long-term international alliances between Europeans and First Peoples beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Landrum provides a new perspective from which to consider the Dakota people’s overt acceptance of this non-Native education system and a window into their ongoing evolutionary relationships, with all of the historic overtures and tensions that began the moment alliances were first brokered between the Algonquian Confederations and the European powers.

Author Bio

Cynthia Leanne Landrum teaches history and Indigenous studies at Portland State University and Clark College. She is the author of The Valley of the Kings: Rehabilitation of the People of the Columbia River and Pacific Rim through Ceremonialism.

Praise

“This study of the Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools is important because it covers the two schools in great depth while also linking various historical contexts and periods. This book will appeal to both scholars in the field and to descendants of the schools’ students. I especially appreciate Landrum’s inclusion of the specter of race science regarding student evaluations at the schools. She also has further clarified and added greater nuance to the discussion of the Puritan ‘praying towns’ and provided a valuable discussion of the self-pedagogy of the Five Civilized Tribes.”—Hayes P. Mauro, associate professor of art and design at CUNY’s Queensborough Community College and author of The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School

“Landrum’s work provides thorough institutional histories of the Flandreau and Pipestone boarding schools and explains how changing federal Indian policies impacted those who taught, administered, and attended them. She also includes a collection of personal reflections, some heartbreaking and some uplifting, by those who passed through those schools.”—Tim Garrison, professor of history at Portland State University and coeditor of The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. History 1. Missionaries and Education in the Upper Midwest 2. The Early Years 3. The Indian New Deal 4. Termination Legislation and Closure of Pipestone Indian School 5. Self-Determination Part 2. Student Reflections 6. Flandreau Indian School 7. Pipestone Indian School Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index